The truth behind Trump’s ‘biggest oil deal in world history’
Donald Trump has long coveted the oilfields of other nations and declared an agreement with Venezuela to be “the biggest oil deal in world history”. But the agreement, reached after the US seized Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, is almost certainly doomed to collapse amid a wide array of legal and logistical issues, a Guardian investigation has found.
The US president first mused about taking oil from Iran in 1987, when he told ABC’s Barbara Walters that Iranian attacks on American shipping during the Iran-Iraq war required an extreme response. “Why couldn’t we go in and take over some of their oil, which is along the sea?” he asked. Over the ensuing years, he has returned frequently to the idea that the US should seize oil from other countries after military conflict, from Libya to Iraq.
Earlier this year, Trump finally got a chance to enact his plan – at gunpoint. US forces stormed Venezuela in January and seized Maduro, who was quickly shuttled to a federal holding facility in the US and replaced by the compliant Delcy Rodríguez. Trump told the Atlantic in the days following the raid: “If [Rodríguez] doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.”
Then in August, Trump announced that the office of strategic capital (OSC) at the Pentagon, which he has rapidly transformed, would own a third of the second-biggest private Venezuelan oil firm, North American Blue Energy Partners (Nabep). Trump said the deal means he’ll soon refill the US strategic petroleum reserve, which dropped to a longtime low after the US invaded Iran.
But virtually everything Trump and his cabinet have said about the deal is false and misleading, according to the experts and officials who spoke with the Guardian. The Venezuelan law governing oil development does not allow for 100-year deals, or anything longer than 25 years. The OSC isn’t authorized by US law, experts say, to own shares in companies. Moreover, they say, the deal as structured won’t bring new capital to Venezuela’s oil sector. [Continue reading…]